In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (Times Literary Supplement), Javier Marías has also translated into Spanish works by such literary giants as Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, and Faulkner. Collected here are 20 "snippets of writers' lives," as Marías writes in his introduction, from such "fairly disastrous individuals" as Mann, Rilke, Conan Doyle, and Emile Brontë, to Dineson, Nabokov, Wilde, and Henry James.

"Mariás has pointed out what we might never think of seeing."—Boston Globe

"He distills each writer's salient personality traits to outline definitive if idiosyncratic portraits: thus 'Nabokov in Rapture'; 'Ivan Turgenev in His Sadness.' Almost all of these essays display Marías's dry humor and affectionate tolerance for his subjects' eccentricities, but the portrayals of Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Yukio Mishima bristle with Marías's disdain. And sometimes the title phrase is tailored to an idée fixe rather than intrinsic to the subject ('Robert Louis Stevenson Among Criminals'). The book is distinguished by supple turns of phrase and bon mots ('every true gentleman has behaved like a scoundrel at least once in his life') and by the photos of each writer from the author's own collection. Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marías 's keen and amusing analyses."—Publishers Weekly